TEN Territory, Encounter & Negotiation

€10.00

TEN Territory, Encounter & Negotiation is a critical memoir exploring a decade of socially engaged art practice through the eyes of the primary artist involved. Set in the south inner-city of Dublin, it offers a uniquely personal and subjective insight into complex working relationships, methods of engagement, creative processes and analyses from a long term project exploring power and policing that operates at the intersection of art, youth work, critical pedagogy and activism.

This relevant contribution is a must read for practitioners and researchers interested in engaging existing theories on durational dialogical interactions, intersubjective bondings, self-determined participation and critical collaborations in socially engaged and public participatory art.

This book will be inspiring for those working in the field of art education, and also for community educators generally. It shows how collaborative art, operating through principles of inventiveness, listening, dialogue and open learning, can create a space for artistic expression among those who have been excluded from art spaces.

Refreshing how in this memoir Fiona eschews the default position of the tip-toeing, ethically constrained artist. Instead she invites readers – like most good ethnographers – into spaces and places where the work is negotiated through strategic slowness if not deliberate caution, via bold leaps of intervention and experimentation, or by trial and error with the inevitable repairing of individual and communal egos, mixed with highs, lows and anxieties about methodology and intent. Such is the working lot of the artist who chooses the world of participatory and socially engaged art. (excerpt from TEN foreward)

Áine O’Brien, Co-Director of Counterpoints Arts, London.

Through an extraordinarily rich and reflective description of the process of engagement alongside philosophical reflection upon, and contextualization of, the projects she describes, Whelan helps us to understand how, methodologically, we might go about durational collaborative practice, how we must become attuned to complex dynamics and power relations attuned if we are to be ethical researchers or artists, the need for mediators, and the variety of ways in which ideas, stories and knowledge can be manifested.